Review: AMD Ryzen 7 1700X

Many, many, and mean MANY moons ago I was an AMD fan thru-and-thru but, as the years past and Intel became the CPU of choice and performance, I switched to Intel. Now, with AMD introducing Ryzen, that might change again. I really like what I see and the price...WOW!

The new processors, spearheaded by the Ryzen 7 1800X, don't quite have the ammunition to surpass Intel in the all-out performance stakes, yet given AMD's misfires in previous generations, the fact that Ryzen is at all competitive is an achievement in itself.

And the new chip is competitive in more ways than one. We won't dig through the modernised Zen architecture all over again - our initial review has that covered - but as a reminder we know that while Ryzen's single-thread performance is reasonable, the chip's real party trick is to offer massive multi-thread potential and to do so for an agreeable fee.

The Ryzen 7 1800X that first passed through our test bench offers eight cores, 16 threads and a peak frequency of 4.0GHz for £490. An Intel chip with that number of cores would cost over twice as much, so the 1800X looks a comparative bargain, or at least, it does until you start to consider other parts in the Ryzen 7 portfolio.